Since we wrote our first blog post two weeks ago, we have been coming a lot further in the development of our concept. Last week we had two meetings, where we mainly focused on putting together our presentation for the mid crit. The feedback we received during the crit was a good mix of positive and constructive, and it has been very useful for us for further developing and working on our concept this week. The constructive feedback mostly regarded the fact that we presented our product as pretty much perfect and did not mention any negative aspects with it. We understand that presenting a product like we did reduces it’s credibility and have therefore been discussing how we could introduce the negative aspects of or concept in our book chapter. The solution we came up with is to write two future scenarios with personas using our product, one utopic vision without problems with the product and one dystopian, where pretty much everything that can go wrong, goes wrong for the persona. By doing that we will be able to paint a bigger picture for our idea, widen our scope, as well as getting familiar with both sides of the coin.
About two weeks ago, we emailed Baki Cakici, upon a recommendation from Daniel Pargman. Baki is a PhD and has done some research in surveillance studies and critical analyses of information and communication technologies. Peer students who took the “Sustainability and Media Technology” course last year will remember the lecture "Designing ICT for future generations: The case of the Stockholm Royal Seaport" that he gave. We described our concept to Baki and asked for a meeting. He answered us this week, but unfortunately he does not have any possibility to meet us since he doesn’t live in Stockholm any more and is busy starting up a new project in London. However he gave us some very useful feedback and shared some of his knowledge and expertise on surveillance issues. Further exploring these topics are on our agenda for next week; who the intended users for our product are, and what implications the future we describe has, as well as who is the person who will least benefit from this system. It feels like Baki’s feedback almost goes hand in hand with the feedback we received during the mid-crit: we need to think through, and present, the limitations and negative aspects of our product to be able to develop it further.
Since our project started, we have been calling and e-mailing several biobanks, with the hope to get a broader understanding of what kind of data they collect today and what other type of data they would like to add to their collections. It has been a challenge since no one has answered, but this week we finally got an answer from one of the biobanks, stating that they could not help to answer our questions and instead directed us to contact the users of the data - research projects (which is not really the answer we expected and wanted).
The next steps in our process is to start writing the book chapter, make a prototype for our platform and start planning our final presentation. We are also still exploring some issues regarding safety, surveillance, users and platform solutions. We have been discussing how we should write our book chapter (what structure to follow etc) and how we would like to pitch our project idea during the final presentation. But to be as time effective as possible, we have been splitting up the work in several areas of responsibility. Anna, Jenny and Kristian will have the main responsibility to write the book chapter while Nicholas and Henrik will focus on making the platform prototype and plan the presentation. We have also decided that until next time we meet, everyone of us should find and read two articles each. We hope that some of them can be used as sources of references when writing our book chapter as well as for more inspiration on how to further develop our concept.
At last we would like to leave you with this positive message of why it is important for You to own Your body’s data. Check this out!
http://www.ted.com/talks/talithia_williams_own_your_body_s_data#t-420930Other valuable things we found and read during the week:
Sounds tough the with the contacts and interviews, but it seems to going quite well anyway. I think you are well under way with your project. Keep up the good work!
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